“All around, and reaching out into the deep darkness, he saw himself.” So ends the David Lynch poem, “Dark Splendor”, that inspired Harruthoonyan’s exploration into a new world constructed by a mythical panspermia. Arrival is marked by new life, as energy existing throughout the universe is redistributed by asteroids & comets. Transition becomes a sacred space between two worlds when the last gasp of a dying star releases its iron into the birth process of a cell.
Saw the Splendor re-imagines the history of the artist’s family in Armenia, Iran and Italy through three different lenses: a telescope, a microscope, and the artist’s imagination. Weaving together the familiar and foreign, Harruthoonyan pushes the viewer to question their subconscious states - much the way he was pushed, as a child, to reconsider language and identity.
The gene of the turritoposis Dohrnii (immortal jellyfish) becomes an ever-developing landscape, a young girl swallows a star and butterflies weave through constellations and space dust.
The artist marries the most majestic and minuscule of the earth’s metamorphoses into the birth of new worlds defined by the beauty of change, itself.
Harruthoonyan’s past create visions of a new earth. On this other earth, bluebirds, an ancient symbol of love and happiness, take the place of distant stars. The Van Allen belt, a protective field between the realms of astronomy and biology, is the invisible circle holding the artist’s vision together. In this belt, the creation, destruction and re-creation of energy is constantly occurring - not unlike the memories of the places where our families are born, and reborn, throughout generations. While it cannot be seen with the naked eye, when the movement of this energy is translated into auditory waves, it sounds like a circle of birds chirping - proving that it is, perhaps, only our limited mentalities or methods that keep us from experiencing the new worlds awaiting just beyond the stories that defined our past.